Donald Urquhart

Jayne

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Donald Urquhart
Jayne
2000
ink on paper
46 x 34 cm

Jayne Mansfield was a 1950s movie star and pin-up well known for her appearance in Playboy and her pioneering of the ‘wardrobe malfunction’ as a publicity stunt. Mansfield’s later life was marked by alcoholism and extra-marital affairs; her untimely death in a car accident at the age of 34 became one of the most sensationalised macabre events in celebrity history when images of her decapitated scalp appeared amongst photographs of the automotive wreckage. Urquhart renders her image as a frightful distortion, her face almost skull-like, an awkwardly mounted appendage between her huge hair and bosoms. Urquhart took this image from an old newsreel of Mansfield attending a premiere, and part of the drawing’s disproportion is a reflection of the way a figure’s motions appear warped when put on pause, as well as the high-contrast choppiness of early film. (The other part is because he made the drawing freehand, sitting very close to the TV!)